1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to portal pages, and more particularly to a solution for generating a portal page based on a data item.
2. Background Art
The use of portal pages and portlets have greatly enhanced a user's ability to customize content that is provided over computer networks such as the Internet. As known, a “portal page” is generated at a web “portal” server by portal server software (e.g., WebSphere Portal Server, which is commercially available from International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y.). A portal page typically includes one or more sections or visual “portlets” that each contain certain content formatted according to a user's preferences. For example, a user could establish his/her own portal page that has portlets for news, weather and sports. When the portal page is requested by the user, the portal server obtains the desired content from the content provider associated with each portlet. Once obtained, the content is aggregated and uniform resource indicator (URI) references to advertisements and other supplemental content can be inserted into the markup language for display in the appropriate sections as a portal web page. This portal technology has lead to the explosion of personalized “home” pages for individual web users.
To date, the generation of a portal page requires extensive user interaction. For example, the user generally selects one or more desired portlets from a list of available portlets, manually places, sizes, and formats each selected portlet on a portal page, provides any data that may be necessary to obtain desired data for the portlet (e.g., a geographic area for weather information), etc. As a result, the content of a portal page is generally static and cannot be readily created and/or modified on the fly.
Many applications could benefit from the dynamic generation of a web page such as a portal page. For example, a user may monitor the health of a computer network. If a problem occurs on the network, the user may desire additional information such as information on the maintenance history of a problematic hardware item, a schematic of the network configuration, contact information for one or more individuals that can address the problem, etc. However, to date, portal pages have not been able to be readily used in these situations.
As a result, a need exists for an improved solution for generating a portal page. In particular, a need exists for a method, system and program product that select one or more portlets, and generate a portal page that includes the selected portlets based on a data item with no or a reduced amount of required user interaction.